FROM ETERNITY TO HERE         by Glen Alan Hamilton Gwen tells me that James Dean is still alive. She had dinner with him last night. They went to a movie and he was cool but kind of shy. I’m laughing and telling her that’s neat, I always dug him and she’s smiling and telling me she hopes she sees him again and I tell her don’t hold your breath and she asks me why would she do that? Gwen is pretty and sweet and probably crazy but that’s okay. Everything’s crazy and I believe her when she tells me that he told her to call him “Jimmy” because as we are walking down Parkway Boulevard I see a man’s head split open and pieces of his skull fall at our feet as a television materializes inside of him.     “Things are weird.” Gwen says, stepping over the man’s body and I continue to hold her hand and we keep walking.     Time got screwed up.     Ken is beating a woman, telling her he wants her purse and she just looks up at him, the blood flowing down her face making her eyes flicker open and shut and she asks him why? He pauses at this, looks at me and I shrug and I think she’s right. Why? We step away from the woman and then we are four blocks away and talking about something I didn’t realize we had started talking about. It is the day after Gwen disappeared but maybe not because I remember being born the day before that so who can tell? Ken and I went to school together but he thinks he moved his freshman year but I remember us graduating together.     The building off to our left vanishes and is replaced by a field and the cow standing in it looks up at us and chews on the blades of grass in his mouth and I stare at this, fixating on the way his mouth moves up and down. The cow spits out some of the blades and runs his foot, paw, hoof, whatever it’s called, back and forth over them. I’m thinking I can’t remember the last time I actually touched grass. I’m thinking maybe when I was a little boy. I’m thinking, maybe that was yesterday.     Ken lights a cigarette. I tell him about Gwen’s dinner with James Dean and he asks me, why? Why the hell can’t something like that happen to him with all this shit going on? Why couldn’t he have dinner with Marilyn Monroe or Janis Joplin or even Bo Derek? I tell him Bo Derek is still alive and he says that’s not the point and asks me if I’m sure she is and I tell him I’m not and we keep walking.     I think, maybe an experiment went wrong.     Gwen thinks it’s the Mayans. They knew stuff, she tells me. They knew.     Gwen is back or maybe she never left. She’s thirteen instead of eighteen and in spite of all the craziness, in spite of the fact that she or I or anything might not be here in the next ten minutes I won’t sleep with her because it just seems wrong. She gets mad and looks so cute and I hope that one day we’ll meet as children because I think that would be so nice and sweet.     There is a radio where the television used to be and when I turn it on they are broadcasting something called “The Shadow” and we sit quietly and listen for a long time until the broadcast stops and the radio disappears. That was nice she tells me and I agree and then she is somewhere in her sixties and her eyes crinkle up and we hold each other and cry and Gwen says, the galaxy breathes, and then she is gone again.     Things are just getting out of hand.     Ken and I are walking down the street again and I’m almost sure it’s a few days later. The ground starts shaking and I think I hear Ken say an earthquake is just so totally not what we need right now and we see a huge shape coming from around the side of the building on the corner and realize it’s not. A dinosaur, a big, huge, dinosaur, so much larger than anything I’d ever seen on TV or imagined in the movies is coming down the street. The woman running from it is screaming but the slamming drowns the sound out and we watch as she squishes under the thing’s foot. It barrels past, making a horrendous screeching kind of noise. We watch it go, watch it turn the corner of the next block and resume our walk.     Ken lights a cigarette and tells me he still hasn’t seen Marilyn Monroe.     Gwen tells me she was in Africa today. Only she’s not sure if it was Africa but there were lions and those big running birds and what are they called and I tell her I think maybe gazelle’s but I’m not sure.     She tells me okay, yeah, maybe and she was in other places too. She tells me she saw statues. She tells me they were nice. They hummed. She asks me how my day was and I tell her actually pretty sad and she asks me why? I tell her I woke up in the street and I was near the block where the house I grew up in was. I tell her I walked down there, but my house wasn’t there, the street was different and I wonder what changed and where and if the house wasn’t there does that mean I was ever born and do I even exist?     She kisses me and says, cycles. It’s all about cycles. She smiles and kisses me again and says it’s okay. She read about this in school. She says, don’t worry about your family, we’ll have a family of our own because she’s pregnant. I ask her when this happened, I don’t remember and she kisses me again and smiles sweetly and says, someday I will. She hopes I will.     The radio is back again and playing some other show I don’t know and then there’s music and then it’s gone. Then there’s a screen, a big huge one likes it’s a drive-in but we’re not in a car and things are flickering and then that’s gone too. I sigh and tell Gwen maybe it’s the movies. She asks me what I mean. I tell her, you know, people sharing memories of films. Reproduced. Not the year they came out. Watched at home. Fake images making fake snaps of fake times. Gwen says interesting, but that’s not it. She says don’t worry, soon we’ll be making our own movie. A real one, a living one. Not spending so much time watching fake life. Soon people will be living it. She says, people are just so silly.     I ask her what then? What’s happening and she smiles and says things live and things die all at the same time all over the world, that’s not new. Maybe everything just needs to live and die all at once now.     I’m about to ask her what that means and there’s a baby where she used to be and maybe it’s her, maybe it’s ours, I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’m the one who’s crying.     The end of days is here.     The man in the robe on the corner is saying this and Ken and I are walking closer to him. I’m stopping to tie my shoes and wondering where all the cars are and Ken is walking over to the man. I’m watching them talk and then Ken is smashing the guy on the side of his head with his fist and he’s falling to the ground and Ken is walking back over to me. I’m asking him what happened and Ken is shrugging and saying, nothing, the dude was full of shit. I’m asking him why and he’s saying, the dude said it was a time of change but he wouldn’t give me any quarters.     I’m saying nothing and walking a little further ahead of Ken and wondering if, why, he and I ever really were friends.     Abandon all hope is something I remember from something I read once in high school.     Gwen and I are walking. Maybe Ken used to be where she is now. Maybe I used to be where Gwen is now. I don’t know. We’re both here now. There aren’t anymore streetlights on the corners. That’s okay, it’s daytime. We’re walking down the sidewalk, only I don’t think it’s really concrete anymore and Gwen is saying look. There’s a building off to our right, one of those high rise maybe full of offices kind of things. It’s shimmering, Gwen says and then it’s gone. Only the people inside aren’t and there’s the briefest moment where I can see the faces of some of them before they start falling.     Down. From I don’t know how many stories up, on top of each other. We’re far enough away to avoid the splashing, still hear the crunching and I’m looking away.     Things are dissolving, I’m saying.     Gwen is smiling and saying, that’s right, things. I’m shaking my head and saying, this is just unreal. She’s taking my hand and putting it in hers and saying, things, they don’t matter. This is real.     I’m smiling, trying to, and we’re moving because the blood coming from where the building used to be, where the piles of people are now, is flowing like a slow river.     And Gwen smiles and says, things flow.     The time of no time is something Gwen said she read once in high school.     Ken tells me he saw something on TV today and I ask him if he’s sure it was today and he says probably, maybe, yeah. He tells me it was something about a reporter talking about the magnetic poles on the earth shifting. Changing places. Something about the iron inside the core and how it can move and something called the dipole disappearing. Ken is laughing and saying, dipole. He’s saying, the guy said something about when it comes back the polarities shift. North and south actually switch places and some other things I don’t really understand.     He says it happened before, or so the guy said, a long time ago and I wonder if maybe that explains everything that’s happening. Maybe all things before all this happened. The weird things people can’t explain about things they’ve found, artifacts, old maps, old places. Small things. Big things. Things bigger than me. Ken shrugs and says the reporter thought maybe that’s why everything is happening and I ask him if he knew when the shifting thing would stop. Ken smiles and says the guy said it could take a long time but it will happen and I ask him when. Ken laughs so hard there are tears in his eyes but I think he isn’t laughing and he says the guy said, sometime in the near future and he was laughing so hard they had to stop the broadcast.     Ken says the sun sure is bright today.     I take a really, really long drink of my beer and when I bring it back down from my face Ken is gone and his house is gone and I don’t know where I am.  I begin to cry and the beer spills and I watch the liquid as it pours across the floor, sliding and slipping and I just throw my head back and begin screaming.     Gwen is suddenly in front of me. She is naked and I ask her where she’s been and she just smiles. She says, look at the sky and I do. She says, circles. Everything out there is circles. She says, everything everywhere is circles. They’re perfect. She says, have you ever thought about that? I’m still crying, unable to speak and Gwen says they’re perfect. Around and around. They don’t end, you know? But they do. You start at one point and come around and you’re back at that same point. But you go past it. Over it.     And Gwen says, in the end, it doesn’t matter. The circle still goes around.     She asks me what do I see when I look at her? I pause, my beer is gone, everything else around me is gone and I say the only thing I can think of, the thing I guess there is to say and I say, myself. I see myself.     Gwen smiles and says, take my hand and I do. We begin to move, around and around in a circle, like children playing and Gwen says, everything moves, everything rotates and some thing’s stay in orbit and some things fly away and I can’t speak, I’m just spinning. Spinning and Gwen is slipping from my hands and I’m screaming and Gwen is saying, everything will be okay if you just let go.     And I do.  SO SAYETH THE WORD      by Glen Alan Hamilton Marlena is naked and dancing in her cowboy boots. She turns and moves to the beat of the music, breaking from her trance to occasionally look up at me and smile. I’m lying on the bed and smoking a cigarette and watching her. The song ends, another begins and her gyrating slows and she looks sad and looks up at me from under a tangled mess of dark hair and asks, “Do you remember Billy?”     I sigh and crush the end of the cigarette out into the glass ashtray and slowly rise from the bed. She shakes herself a little more and tries to take my hands and I don’t want to dance, don’t like this song and most of all don’t want to think about Billy.     The music keeps playing and I walk past her and out the door. The sand of the beach feels good on my naked feet and I collapse there and for the briefest moment, my toes curling themselves up in the tiny grains of the sand, I’m a child again. In that moment, I’m thinking how good things were back then, how simple and wonderful and innocent life was and I think of Billy and how much I miss him.     “Come dance with me.” I hear Marlena whine from inside the house and I turn.     I’m back inside and I take her hands this time. We let our bodies lose themselves to the music and I block out the words because I can and I don’t know why it works this way and when the next song comes on, the slow one, I hold her close. Her body feels good, warm against the chill coming off the ocean and she turns her head up to mine.     “This is nice, isn’t it?” She asks, her lips parting. When I lean down to kiss her, my hands find the smooth line of her neck, and the music is playing and someone in it is saying something I can’t block, can’t help but hear and I’m excited and starting to sweat and quickly, too easily, I jerk my hands. And with a snap, it breaks.     Her body falls to the floor and the music keeps playing and I whisper, “I told you not to talk about him. I did.”     I walk back out onto the beach, the air causing my skin to bubble in reflex to the chill and Billy’s voice is in my head. It is telling me, you’re open now, aren’t you? The sand is in my toes again and the air from the ocean rushes over me and I feel myself smiling and then not, and thinking of Billy.     “Onion. Onion, onion, onion!”     I am a child again, thinking of that time and it’s my sister. She’s yelling these words, chasing me across the vast stretch of dirt that was the farm that was our house. I’ve got my hands over my ears and my eyes are watering and I’m screaming for my mother, screaming for her to make my sister stop, to make it all stop.     Then my mother is catching me, holding me in her arms and asking my sister, “Why do you do that? You know how he is. You know.”     Then we are in the doctor’s office and my mother is asking him, “How is he?”     The doctor tells her fine. Healthy, strong. Just your average, normal boy. Except for one thing.     Sense memory.     These are the words, but it’s all about words. This is the thing. He is telling her my brain is different. Wrong. But not in a bad way, he tells her. He just sees things clearer than other people. Remembers them. Vividly.     “Would you like some ice cream?” He asks me and my mouth waters in reflex and my teeth chill and my mother sees it and her eyes water as the saliva drips from my mouth and my body starts to shake.     Tarantula.     This is why I am home I am telling my mother. The boy behind me kept whispering the word over and over again and I ran screaming from class. My mother says she understands and she’ll work a second job and I’ll just stay home and she’ll order one of those learn at home tapes from the TV. She asks me if she can trust me to be alone and I tell her she can. I know the word trust.     I meet Billy on my last day at public school and I wonder if it’s my condition or the world or if words are meaningless if you can’t touch them or feel them because I think I learn the word friend.     We do things. Billy teaches me. He teaches me kick and I never play any sports with the kids we meet in the park. Because I think of the girl behind the big building on the last day of school when I met Billy and all it means is the shoe going into her stomach over and over again and her screaming and the sound that goes, thump, thump, thump.     Billy liked books. They are different he would tell me and he was right. The words were there, but not in my head. In the way that they made me do things like the time the man on the video tried to tell me about science and fusion and burning and I knew this and my mother came home as the couch was on fire. I was there with the matches and I learn spank and later, I like it.     Billy tells me it’s not my fault. “You have to think. Listen. You red the paper? No, you read the paper. Read, read, it’s the same. But it’s not. You have to look. See it both ways. Deeper.”     Deeper.     I learn this, feel this, when I am older. I learn new words. Words that stick. Words that Billy likes.     Pussy.     It sticks and it is wet and warm and soft and grabbing and I’ve met Marlena. I’m driving and I’m good at it though I don’t know why and I’m leaving home and my mother is crying and as I’m putting my suitcase in the trunk, I focus on the single tear running down her face and this becomes sadness to me. I have others memories when we are older. Marlena watching music videos, telling me things would be okay if she was taller. Things would be just fine if she was taller. Billy laughing and telling her to turn it off, it only reminds him of the women he isn’t sleeping with and she does. Her turning it back on when he leaves, moving on the couch to the music, stretching.     We were living in an apartment, the three of us and we were unemployed and I was drilling Marlena in a different way and Billy would watch and she would let him. Billy would giggle and would whisper, steal. He would whisper window, glass and shatter and then we were in the local school at night. Marlena was naked on a teacher’s desk and I made love to her while Billy wrote profanities on the chalkboard. Over the top of them, me on top of her, I saw him scribbling frantically and all the words said, more, more, more.     Trepanation. I hear this on TV and I don’t know what it means. Billy buys books or maybe he steals them and he tells me about things people used to do and pressure on the brain and about making holes and about release. I remember the drill. Pushing it into the skull, hearing it whine, feeling the bone beneath it splinter. I remember staring at his brain, and him smiling and telling me, it’s good. It feels so good.      Billy got a job. Got a job for one reason and it was this that we did.     The woman came to the door. Billy was there, dressed in his pizza delivery outfit. It was late and she was opening the door and telling him she didn’t order anything. Billy was smiling and he wasn’t really working and telling her sorry, could he use her telephone to call work and fix this mistake? She was saying yes and he was walking across the room and then wrapping the telephone cord around her neck. We were coming in through the open door and he had her pants down and was telling us as he was putting himself into her it’s not breaking and entering. She’s too old for it to be breaking but it is entering but she did let us in and he was pumping and I was staring at the open hole in the back of his head in the mirror by the phone and losing myself to the darkness there.     He did this a few more times until someone called in a report of a pizza car, outside the door of one of the victims. Until then, people would answer and Billy would smile and they would trust and when we would drive home I would focus on the street sign in bright yellow and it said, no outlet.     Once, he burned one of the women in the woods and warmed his hands over the flames. Warm. Once, when we were low on money, Billy cooked and told us afterwards what it was and Marlena and I both almost puked but later said it really didn’t taste that bad.     He, we, did other things. The two of us volunteered at the old folk’s home. We tried to be good but Billy would get bored and sometimes give some of them enemas of grape jelly. Marlena stayed home and stretched. We went to see his mom and she got real bitchy and he tied her up and poured liquid cement and plant food down her throat and said, yeah, mom, life’s hard. We all need to grow up. The woman in the park, the one with the child that Marlena held while Billy raped her and ate her face and then laughed about her picture on the Missing Persons wall in the supermarket, was the last. I told him we were leaving. We were going south and things would be different and happy and we left.     And things were better. I learned to block things out. Tried to block, to block, to block. Blocks like bricks on a wall. Better until Marlena had to mention Billy’s name. I shouldn’t have killed her. I shouldn’t have. Should have just told her to call me William like I asked her the day we left. Call me William. Never Billy. Never call me Billy. Never mention Billy again.     I pull the bandana from my head and feel the air there. Cool, crisp, swirling inside my skull. I take my finger and press down through the hole and feel the squishy thing there and I stroke it and I’m smiling again. I break through the spongy covering and feel something even spongier on my fingers and then stroke that and my body tingles.     I rise and I’m walking to the ocean and I’m grinning. I can feel the sting of the salt air on my skin, my skull, my brain. I wonder if the ocean will take me, if it will hurt when the water swooshes in through the hole. I wonder if maybe the sea will just spit me out, cleanse the body and soul and wash me back ashore, the third eye in my head having seen more.     More.     I walk into the ocean and the waves lap at my feet and Billy tells me he wants to come back out. I’m alone he tells me and he knows I’m never alone when he’s there. The water splashes at my waist and I tell him we’ll see. Maybe we’ll be friends again. Maybe things can go back to the way they were again.     Maybe, I tell him. Maybe really means nothing and I tell him another word. I tell him a word I know but don’t really know. I tell him I know swimming and I know dying but this I don’t know, but I will. He will.     Drowning.
	© 2009 Glen Alan Hamilton

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